


i guarantee you'll miss me (because you changed the way that you kiss me)

by shortitude



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Actual Healthy Blake Siblings, Bellamy and Raven share a bed platonically, Did I Mention How Little This Has To Do With Season 3?, F/M, FRIENDSHIP: Lincoln & Raven, FRIENDSHIP: Octavia & Raven, FUCK IT AND ALL ITS BULLSHIT, FUCK SEASON 3, FURIOUSLY IGNORING SEASON 3, Friends to Lovers, Slow Build, This Is About To Be Some HAPPY SHIT, cheek kisses, they also platonically share greek mythology jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 00:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6493921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortitude/pseuds/shortitude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He hugs her first. He pulls her up from where she’s sitting on the bed, and hugs her, and it’s not odd. They’ve shared a bed for three months, they know by now how the other person clings. He knows by now that Raven is worse than tender, she is soft and she is generous and she is above all scared of showing it all. It’s a secret he seems willing to keep, like how she keeps his secret when he tells his sister he’s feeling fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i guarantee you'll miss me (because you changed the way that you kiss me)

**Author's Note:**

> Dedications! First of all, tumblr user **unidentifiedblackthorn** gave me a prompt for cheek kisses a couple of days back. I sat on it, and today it felt Necessary, so here's to you: mutual cheek kisses  & Braven & other good stuff.  
> Second of all, to my friends who ship this ship with me and are going through a rough day because of how much the show _sucks ass_ \- this is for you guys. If you keep reading, I'll guarantee you platonic bed-sharing, Oddysey references, Raven-centric story with a happy ending and exactly ZERO torture scenes, Lincoln  & Raven friendship, NONE OF OUR FAVES DYING OR BEING TURNED INTO VILLAINS BC JTRASH, Blakes siblings being actually great, Octavia being a good pal, more Raven and happiness and did I mention happiness and Raven? Get it.

He does it the first time. 

Winter catches them by surprise, sweeping in with a deadly calm and little warning. The Ark’s remains serve as a shelter from the cold, certainly, but it’s not without its imperfections. 

Grounders have been surviving the inclement weather for centuries now, without metal constructions with AC-units that don’t work and blankets that keep nobody warm because there were no changing seasons in space. Grounders would know how to survive this, would know how to teach them, but they’re not talking to the Grounders currently – so there’s that. 

Crashing to the ground in pieces has taken a lot out of the seemingly-eternal structure, and the heating is shot. It takes the first temperature drop for them to realize they’re going to need to work on _that_ stat. Efforts are divided, between the greenhouse that Monty puts together, and getting an actual heating system to work on a very small section of the Ark – the one towards the middle of the structure, because there are no exit doors as much as there are suddenly places where the Ark is no more. 

Raven leads the team of amateurs and mechanics to fix that, while the rest of the efforts are placed in making sure they have some sort of food during the winter that’s not all game. This means a lot of ignoring the doctors’ orders to stay put and not exert pressure on her legs, and working outside in the brisk weather with just her red jacket on and a long-sleeved shirt that she gets from Sinclair. 

It also means a lot of Abby getting upset at her because she won’t listen, but Raven has never liked to hear people tell her about all the things that she’s not _meant_ to do, nor about the things that she _shouldn’t be able to_ do. So of course, she goes right over the Chancellor’s head, and wrestles Sinclair into pushing forward her ideas to rehabilitate the Ark into being a cozy place in which to suffer through the winter. 

There’s a saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day, which Octavia keeps repeating with an annoying chirp at anyone who comes in to try and distract Raven from working or to ask why she’s not working fast enough. (That is, before Octavia resorts to simply shoving those people out of Raven’s workshop altogether with a _Kindly fuck off out of here, we’re busy._ Even to the Chancellor.)

It takes Raven a whole three weeks, although she’s not alone in this; a whole team of people lines up to help out, and still it takes them that long. By the second snowfall, the interior of the Ark is a welcoming, warm place, and the showers run on hot water and there are blankets to go around, because someone takes a team out into Mount Weather to scout for supplies. 

(At one point in the first two weeks, Abby and Kane suggest the motion to move everyone to Mount Weather. Raven learns later that Sinclair, Bellamy and Miller Sr were the ones to point out that just because the repairs weren’t done yet didn’t mean they all gave up.)

The downside of it all isn’t that it takes them three weeks of huddling together for warmth at night, two per bunk. It’s actually nice, to feel a person beside her and feel safe; for this very purpose, she chooses the quietest one, the one who – she feels – knows her the best. Fair point: she tries to pick Octavia first for the whole ‘well, we’re both girls so there’ll be no boners’ thing, but Octavia’s already bunked with Lincoln and as much as he smiles as if he’s daring her to say she’ll just join them ( _platonically_ ) she already suspects O’s a kicker. She picks Bellamy, but it’s more like he picks her; when Kane announces the safety measure to share beds, he’s standing beside her and she feels him lean towards her, just an inch. It’s the first time she’s seen him lean _towards_ people rather than away from them, since Mount Weather went down. So he picks himself for her, and it’s the best choice she makes. 

Bellamy is a quiet bed-mate. He doesn’t tease, or talk, or move around much. He doesn’t try to crowd her, or push her into loosening up, or tell her to get her shit together. (She feels a little sorry for whoever accepts Kyle to bunk with them, honestly, but that’s not her problem anymore.) Sometimes she looks at Bellamy, just looks, and they have an entire conversation in just that glance. They even develop a system of silent sneers to say things ranging from _There goes Kane on a political campaign again_ to _Yes, Raven, stop trying to remind me how laid my sister is getting, I know_. 

So that, that’s not the downside. The downside is the tree weeks of working mostly outside, which end with Raven falling ill. 

When it happens, it’s just a regular day. She wakes up, rolls out of bed, gets dressed. Bellamy’s already gone to his shift, and she has a suspicion that he took her breakfast to her workshop because he’s a mother-hen sometimes. It’s there when she steps inside, but her stomach can’t hold it down, so she leaves it aside. And forgets all about it. 

Later, when Bellamy comes to find her with whatever issue they found outside the Ark now and helps her roll out from under the rover, she chalks feeling faint to being pulled up too fast and maybe hunger. She stumbles a little towards him, however, and because she frowns, it happens. 

His lips feel very cool on the apple of her cheekbone. It takes her a moment, as long as she needs to close her eyes and exhale with this inexplicable feeling of _longing_ that washes over her, to realize that he’s not kissing her cheek. He’s feeling for a fever. 

He finds it, too. 

 

*

 

The first time she does it is a week later. 

The cold keeps Raven in the risk zone for three days, during which she slips in and out of consciousness and rejects a few forms of warm soup made of some medicinal roots that Lincoln swears by. Abby and Jackson tell her about meds from Mount Weather, but Raven throws that option out the window with a round _no_. She’s taken enough from Mount Weather, she doesn’t want it to heal her. She doesn’t want to be grateful to it, when it’s caused such harm. 

The one relief is that her leg wounds have healed up, so her catching a cold does nothing for them really. That’s one infection less she has to worry about. 

But fever and coughing and a loss of appetite, those she has to struggle with for three days. In those three days, though, she knows who sits at her bedside with the awful soup. She knows who presses cold compress after compress to her forehead, and whose stories reach her ears through a hazy state. 

One week later, Raven rolls on her side slowly, and watches him sleep in the chair next to her bed, his head at an uncomfortable angle. Still feeling weak, she reaches out and lets her fingers slip over the back of his hand, startling him awake. 

“What’s wrong?” is the first thing he asks, because of course it is. He’s worn it out by now. 

Raven musters up a small smile and croaks out with, “Is there any soup?” 

It’s the first time she shovels food into her mouth on her own since the illness took over. Bellamy just helps her to sit up against the headboard, and sets the plate in her lap, but he sits next to her just in case. Nothing happens, just Raven actually humming around spoonful after spoonful of soup, and feeling like she’s finally out of the woods. 

When she’s done, he takes the empty plate and murmurs, “I’ll go tell Jackson.” 

She reaches for his hand, and makes him linger. “Not yet.” 

If the world is guided by a system of offer-and-demand, she would like to specify that what she offers next isn’t because she feels like she owes him. She does owe him, of course; he could’ve left her in the infirmary instead of insisting that he take her to their bunk, but that’s not the case. She does it, because she hasn’t felt this out of the woods in months. 

He stays immobile while she leans towards him, his eyes widening a fraction; he holds his breath, and she can tell that because he almost breathes out against the side of her head, into her dirty hair. She kisses his cheek very briefly, then pulls away . 

Again, the silent conversation through just a glance. Her smile says _thank you_. His smile says it back. When he ducks his head just a little, she spots the fading freckles on his nose and thinks that now she’s out of the woods, she can finally catch glimpses of the stars. 

 

*

 

Life carries on. Spring follows winter, snow melts and vegetation grows again and their greenhouse gives fruit for the first time. 

Spring is a season of rebirth, of the budding start of warmth. It also is the season of separation. Raven has read enough and heard enough stories during the winter of sharing a bunk with Bellamy to know about this one, as it’s one of her favorites. Not that, you know, there’s a lot of Greek myths he knows that don’t start from some tragedy or another. 

When spring comes to thaw the Ark’s people, scouting teams are formed. Some are meant to go further than others, and Bellamy’s will reach the furthest. Because of course, a winter without any news from Clarke has lead Abby close to the edge and this is their way to fix it. Some people (Raven, Octavia) don’t agree with the plan, but what can you do about it. 

She stays behind, because she knows how the Ark works now, since its redesign is about ninety-percent hers. That’s what Sinclair says. (She stays behind because she’d slow them down. That’s what orders from above mean.) 

It will be the first time in three months that she’ll go to sleep alone, and it hasn’t hit her yet how different that will suddenly be. It won’t, until he’s gone for three days. But before that happens, she watches him pack his supplies in a backpack in preparation, and watches the way he frowns to try and guess if he’s unhappy or he’s worried or he’s both. (He’s both. It’s tragic.)

“You know, Persephone always comes back,” she quips, out of the blue. 

He looks up at her slowly, his eyebrows raised – at least not frowning – and after a beat, there’s a small quirk of his lips that she feels content about. “And I’m supposed to be Persephone here?” 

“Would you rather be Odysseus?” she jokes, and then takes a look at his face. “What am I saying -- of course you’d rather be Odysseus.” 

He smiles, and she pockets the memory, for another time. “Well, it’s not like you gave me pomegranates.” 

“Whatever.” She waves him off, used to this part by now; they’ve compared themselves and their friends to characters in his favorite stories – and hers – many a night out of pure boredom. It has always ended with a heated debate, and there’s no time now. She needs to get this out. “What I mean to say is, they always come back.” 

He looks at her, quiet – again quiet, always quiet – before letting out a resigned sigh. “Raven.” 

“I know it’s a necessary mission or whatever bullshit the Chancellor called it,” she mutters. To be fair, everyone knows this mission isn’t to map the terrain, it’s to find the person who ran and didn’t want to be found. “But, just – you come back. _You_ come back.” 

He hugs her first. He pulls her up from where she’s sitting on the bed, and hugs her, and it’s not odd. They’ve shared a bed for three months, they know by now how the other person clings. He knows by now that Raven is worse than tender, she is soft and she is generous and she is above all scared of showing it all. It’s a secret he seems willing to keep, like how she keeps his secret when he tells his sister he’s feeling fine. 

Three months together have gotten them both closer to feeling fine, but who knows how long he’ll be gone now. Who knows what dangers, what monsters, what men he’ll run into? Who knows how he’ll come back, because she refuses to think he won’t. 

“Just come back,” she murmurs again, her lips close to his ear. To punctuate it, she kisses his cheek, and remembers the way he exhales into her clean hair. Pockets it for later. 

 

*

 

They don’t have a scout sitting atop the tallest structure of the camp to notice the group’s return, but they have a radio system that mostly works. Raven slips a walkie talkie into Bellamy’s backpack the last night he’s there with a note on how and when to use it, and an unspoken confession that she’s not meant to hand out walkies. Like she’d listen. 

So the truth is, she knows they’re coming back a full four hours before everyone else spots them, but she can’t share it with anyone because they’ve kept the missing walkie talkie between them. She needed them to have it, just in case of emergencies; she’s ever so grateful there was no need for emergency cases, though when she hears Bellamy’s voice after a crackle of static, a month after static, she thinks she’s hallucinating. 

She sits on the news for four hours, alone, keeping the radio next to her at all time just in case. Octavia isn’t in Camp Jaha, or Raven would tell her now; Lincoln and her are away to collect herbs. She could try to take the rover out and find them, but it’d be unsanctioned and she’s been doing a lot of unsanctioned things later. She hopes that Clarke’s return will help calm Abby down, or distract her from noticing all of Raven’s acts of rebellion. 

_Soon_ , she thinks, every hour on the hour, for the next four hours. 

When the news makes it to her workshop via excited shouts, she makes her way out of the Ark on steady legs. It’s the only steady thing about her, her legs anchoring to the ground. She takes one look at the returned scouting team, and feels abuzz and aflutter. 

So she rushes towards him, and barely notices that he rushes to meet her halfway, too busy crashing into him and letting him sweep her up into a long hug. They linger, linger, until she stops shaking and he stops inhaling her like he’s starved and she’s food. His hands run over her back, hers mimicking them on his back, on his shoulders and into his hair. His fingers are caked with dirt, hers are greasy with engine oil. Who the fuck cares?

“Hades never looked so good,” he murmurs eventually, his face hidden against the crook of her shoulder as she runs tunnels through his hair with her fingers. 

She lets out a snort; he’d sit on that one for a month, of course. What a nerd. “You need a shower,” she tells him instead of the truth. ( _I missed you so much, there have been nights I couldn’t breathe, what the fuck?_ is a long truth to share now.) 

“I know,” he laughs quietly, and nuzzles the neckline of her shirt with his nose. She kisses his cheek, tastes dirt and feels the faintest hint of a beard, and the buzz in her stomach stops. Quiet falls, so she lingers. 

She only pulls away when he exhales. The look at each other quietly, the rest of the world practically faded away by now – where Raven is concerned – until Octavia’s excited scream of “ _Bell!_ ” snaps them out of it. 

 

*

 

The world doesn’t stop just because Clarke is back. In fact, Raven couldn’t be more happy that everything still runs its course, even with Clarke back. 

It’s been only a day, though, and Clarke hasn’t come out of Abby’s rooms yet, so there’s that. Still, routine goes back to normal. 

She needs it. 

There’s a tension in the back of her neck that’s there because she spent all night last night wondering if they assigned Bellamy a new bunk, if he was crowded by Octavia, or if he’s simply not going to come share the bed with her now that spring is in full bloom. The best solution for this sort of tension is now a part of her daily routine. 

Lincoln waits for her in the gym after breakfast, with Octavia sharpening a knife in the sidelines like she’s some sort of glorious warrior guardian of sorts. Truthfully, she comes because she likes to laugh when Raven gets her ass handed to her, and cheer when she gets back up again anyway. 

Fighting always happened spontaneously for Raven. She grew up under the realization that if you want to keep safe, you have to _keep yourself_ safe, because your parents sure as hell won’t. Since she can’t hang around warriors every time, and she can’t always run away from danger, she’s found a fix. It’s not a quick fix, and it involves a lot more bruises than she likes, but she wears all those bruises with confidence, with pride. She now understands why Octavia sported them with pride herself; it’s a defiance. It’s defiance towards the system, towards their childhood, towards their limitations. 

Lincoln is very good at playing to her limitations, and never calls them such. He shows her ways to spin into her left knee so her brace’s weight will take care of knocking a person down, but it’s Octavia who practices with her. Octavia is more vicious, more nothing-to-lose; Lincoln tries his best to always be calm and gentle, even when he’s facing two short and angry women who tell him to fight them. 

She’s on the mat when Bellamy walks into the gym, face-down so she misses his reaction when he finds the three of them. Doesn’t miss the “What the –“ that comes from the doorway, or the way Lincoln practically jumps away from her. 

She plants both hands on the mat and lifts her head to grin at Bellamy, sweaty from the exercise. “Look at what the tide dragged in.” 

If he picks up on her reference, he doesn’t let it show; he’s scanning the room, scanning her face and Lincoln’s hands and Octavia’s relaxed stance, until he determines that there’s no danger. 

Before he has a say in it, she gets up from the mat, agile enough to spot a glimpse of fascination in his eyes, and waves him over with a smug gesture. “I could take you down.” 

She can take him down, yes; she suspects, however, that he lets her. Bellamy hasn’t been around when she rushed into Lincoln’s home and demanded to be trained to not fall into everyone’s hands. Bellamy hasn’t been around for the weeks of physical therapy disguised as physical training that Lincoln definitely subjected her. It’s natural that he’s hesitant, that he’s scared of hurting her. She imagines he’s hurt a few people in his month away, again. 

She throws him down in a move that Lincoln taught her, and his weight and stature offers resistance, which is _good_. Throwing Bellamy down is as real a practice as being stuck in front of an enemy, for a moment. 

After, she helps him up, and he asks, “Are you okay?” As if she’s the one who landed on her ass just a while ago. She squeezes his hand with an amused laugh, and lifts her free hand to tap his cheek lightly. 

“Thanks for that.”

It’s with a public this time, because she acknowledges that they’re there watching. She doesn’t do it so that Lincoln and Octavia can see, she does it because she wants to prove to herself that she just can. So she kisses his cheek, and smiles against his skin when he huffs against her hair. 

“You need a shower,” he jokes, and pokes her sides very lightly. What do you know, the tension between her shoulders is gone. 

 

*

 

In the time he was away, she found the need to fill in the silence of the bunk somehow, because it turns out that however quiet Bellamy Blake was, he’d still filled the silence often enough that she missed his voice. 

When she gets the rover’s music player to work, she copies the model and makes herself a smaller player for her room, which she sometimes lets other people borrow. Tonight, though, it’s all hers. 

She plays a song whose singer she doesn’t know by heart, but whose lyrics she could recite even in her sleep. It’s been a few hours since sundown, and the camp fire is still up which means there are people still out, celebrating or eating or getting drunk or really, whatever. 

She doesn’t expect the knock on her door, because people know how Raven generally feels about celebrations. 

Bellamy steps inside and closes the door behind him, taking the room in with a quick glance. “I like what you did with the place,” he murmurs, amusement in his gaze as he settles it on the clusterfuck that is the desk. 

“I’m not going out to party,” she tells him, just in case. She aims for a harsh tone, tries to be snippy, but he’s back in her room – which was theirs for three fucking months, _three_ \-- and it already starts to smell like him again so she’s all a mess inside. 

“Sounds like the party’s in here.” The song is played faintly in the background, but now she notices it again as something other than filler noise. It’s a love song. 

“You’re free to stay.” 

“Good.” 

He pushes himself away from the door and steps into the middle of the room, with Raven to meet him halfway. “You’re free to stay the night,” she adds, quietly. 

“Good.” 

He wraps his arms around his waist after a second of hesitation, which she breaks by stepping closer to him herself. He exhales and lets his cheek rest against the side of her head, and if they sway a little it’s not because of the music. (Okay, a little because of the music.) 

(It’s a love song.) “You can stay the morning too,” she adds again, feeling breathless in wait for his answer. 

“Good,” he breathes out, and she feels his smile in her hair so she kisses his cheek. 

She lingers there, until the song is over, until he nuzzles her cheek with his nose before kissing it. As she holds her breath, he presses two more lower, at her jawline, down her neck with three more. She lets her head fall to the side with a breathless moan, and hooks her fingers into the back of his shirt. 

“Come here,” she whispers, urgently, “Come here.” _You’ve been gone for long enough._

He crashes into her. She holds her breath while he kisses her, tasting just like himself but tasting better than she’s ever felt him. She holds her breath until he kisses her cheek and behind her ear and picks her up in his arms with a rumbled, “ _Good_.”

Then she exhales, and laughs against his mouth, and follows the constellations in his freckles. 

 

*

 

She swears there are three small freckles on the left side of his nose that are shaped like Orion’s belt. She has been studying them for a while now, her arm tucked under her head. 

The Ark is too well isolated to let in the chirps of birds from outside, but she can almost picture them on her own. What’s missing, she thinks is natural sunlight trickling in and bathing him in it. Maybe she can find a red tent and pitch it up behind the Camp and they can spend one night there. 

She reaches out to trace Orion’s belt on his nose, and holds her breath when he stretches and pulls her closer with a faint groan. 

“Not yet,” he mumbles. 

She lets out a laugh and leans in to kiss his cheek, and his forehead. “No, not yet.” 

Neither lets go.

**Author's Note:**

> Confession: I thoroughly enjoy writing fics in which I subtly tell you how unimportant the Griffins are.


End file.
